AMD vs. Intel: 10 notebooks tested
Summary: We put two of the toughest chip makers up against each other to see which has the biggest heart for notebooks.
Editor's choice: LG LW60 ExpressIf you look at the selection of notebooks tested this month you can pretty much pick a winner in the three categories, of performance, price, and features.
If your mobile need is raw grunt then you just cannot go past the AMD Turion 64 equipped Asus A6000 -- in business and multimedia applications the A6000 was well ahead of the other notebooks and for gaming the Asus had the highest performance in DirectX9. Unfortunately Asus has not finalised pricing for the A6000 but we expect it to be quite competitive.
If you simply need a powerful notebook without too many bells and whistles, such as widescreen display, and more importantly you want to minimise the damage to your credit card then definitely look at the Acer TravelMate 4150 priced at just AU$2299. The Acer was surprisingly fast considering it's modestly clocked processor, in this crowd it is modest at least, and as an added bonus the Acer had the longest battery life of all the notebooks under test.
The overall winner, however, is the LG LW60 Express. The LG is feature rich, has a great widescreen display, was the only notebook to include a keyboard that has a full numeric keypad and at an RRP of AU$3299 is reasonably priced.
This article was first published in Technology & Business magazine.
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Talkback
I know AMD v's Intel but Apple smoke them all
good review!
LG LW60
The Instant-On works pretty well, though if you are watching DVD's on the train (on the way to/from work...) I have noticed that if there is too much bouncing around it just hangs and has to be switched off/on, whereas the Windows apps such as Power DVD just skip for a bit. Oh yeah, the remote control that stores in the pcmcia slot is brilliant, it even works with Power DVD, WMP, etc.
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Overall, the review is spot-on with this laptop... I am certainly very happy with it.
Asus a6000
They are very different machines depending on this letter.
The nvidia graphics on the a6000 is only available on the very highest spec and is not available everywhere.
All the other models (infact any amd 64 notebook/setup) using the sis graphics have a MAJOR MAJOR problem.
The SIS graphics 661/MX (aka mirage series) use the memory controler to allocate video bandwidth. on the SIS m760 setup the chipset memory controller is not present (because of the amd64 intergrated on chip).
The problem here is that the combination results in a severe lack of bandwidth to the graphics chip (espeically when the cpu is throttled). Meaning simple XV overlay of video etc is corupted alot. It also means that Dual head must be droped in resolution.
This is a serious bug, and is a testament to ASUStek's engineers (there are also other brands with similar issues) hastily putting together a platform...
LG LW60 Express